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Back around Labor Day 2013, Senior Editor Lee Hutchinson passed on the various grilled and barbecue delights of a holiday weekend. Instead, he spent seven days testing a peculiar new nutritional meal substitute—Soylent. The product has only grown in notoriety and evolved in its composition since. This long weekend, we're resurfacing Hutchinson's reflection from several months after that initial experience (originally published in May 2014). If interested in some of our Soylent coverage since then, here are a few highlights:

Further Reading

I’ve spilled a lot of virtual ink on Soylent over the past year—I count thirteen pieces, including the five-day experiment from last summer when I ate nothing but the stuff for a full week. This, though, is probably the last Soylent-specific piece that I’ll write for a while. It’s the piece that I’ve wanted to do all along.

Here we're going to talk about how the final mass-produced Soylent product fits into my life, without any stunts or multi-day binges. More importantly, we're going to take a look at exactly what might drive someone in the most food-saturated culture in the world to bypass thousands of healthy, normal, human-food meal choices in favor of nutritive goop. It's something a lot of folks simply can't seem to wrap their heads around. Today it's relatively easy to make a healthy meal, so why in the hell would anyone pour Soylent down their throat?

But if you're asking that question and genuinely can't see an answer, then you're demonstrating both a profound over-projection of your own cultural norms and also a stunning lack of empathy. Food is for some people a genuine struggle. Just because many in the first world have the ability to go to a grocery store and stock up on healthy stuff doesn't mean it's easy, or even possible, for everyone. Blithely dismissing someone's inability to whip up a healthy meal by tossing off a condescending "Soylent? Gross! You don't need that! Just go cook something quick and healthy!" can be about as wrongheaded and insensitive as telling an alcoholic that they could fix all their problems by just drinking less or telling a clinically depressed person that they'd feel better if they'd just stop moping and cheer up.

Everything in its place

Soylent has been released and it's in my house—great big boxes of the stuff, in fact. The difference between this time and my last encounter with it is that this go-round I'm not attempting to exist wholly on Soylent. Rather, I’ve been including it as an occasional component of my regular diet, tossing back a mug or two when I’m hungry but in the middle of doing other stuff.

So far, I haven’t forgotten how to eat normal food, nor have I found myself forsaking the heritage and culinary traditions of my native people (though as a fifth-generation American with a mutt-like mix of western European ancestry, I don’t really know what the hell my heritage and culinary traditions would be other than "beer, assorted"). I’m certainly not abandoning social interaction and slurping Soylent in solitude. I am eating it by myself, but I work from home. Unless I'm out interviewing someone, my lunches are almost exclusively quick solo affairs. For what it’s worth, I like eating lunch alone—I’m introverted, and spending time in silence and contemplation, whether it’s with an artisanal báhn mì sandwich from Nobi (just down the street off NASA Rd 1—highly recommended!) or with a mug of Soylent, is all equally refreshing.

Dinner is the big family meal of the day at Casa Hutchinson, and the fact that I’ve got boxes of powdered Soylent in my kitchen hasn’t changed that. My wife and I still eat together, and so far Soylent has stayed off the dinner menu. Either we’ll cook up something while catching up on our respective days, or we’ll go out to dinner together and do the same. At least to this point, Soylent has not driven any wedges between me and my friends or family.

Foodpocalypse

But those wedges are one of the things Soylent's critics fear the most: that the beige concoction will dissolve the interpersonal glue that the preparation and consumption of food provides. Other objections abound as well, and they run the gamut from reactionary and easily dismissed to thoughtful and troubling.

The easily dismissed ones concern Soylent’s "soy" content (there are only trace amounts) or its lack of originality. It’s not the first liquid nutrition product, but Soylent’s combo of affordability, calories, and purported nutritional completeness make it stand out over competitors like Ensure. In fact, according to the nutritional information on the Ensure site, drinking enough Ensure to reach 2000 calories would result in a person consuming a truly ludicrous 120 grams of sugar. Other non-medical products have similar issues, and actual medical-grade enteral nutrition products are far more expensive than Soylent.

Those objections about social dissolution, on the other hand, do genuinely sound troubling at first. Reducing food to a powder that can be mixed and drunk undermines millennia of evolution and culture and removes one of the fundamental differences between humans and other animals, even other hominids. We homo sapiens actually cook, and a significant part of our culture comes from that cooking and the rituals surrounding the preparation and consumption of food.

These are absolutely valid points—if one is arguing for or against the total replacement of "normal" food with Soylent. But not every meal needs to be a festive life-affirming display of cultural pageantry where we march from kitchen to table bearing the carefully plated masterpieces of locally sourced delicacies while hidden speakers blare the "Circle of Life" song from the Lion King. Sometimes, I need to eat over the keyboard while transcribing an interview, and sometimes I need to eat in the car. Soylent isn't replacing a culturally significant meal in those instances. As with all things, moderation is the key.

Further Reading

There are objections to which Soylent still has no good response. Sitting atop all of them is the fact that in spite of all we’ve learned about how the human body works, the nature of nutrition is still not entirely understood. Soylent attempts to provide the micro and macronutrients that a person needs in a day—but does it deliver? The final shipping product contains a whole raft of ingredients (which creator Rob Rhinehart and the Rosa Labs folks say will be changing over time as the formula evolves), but the quantity and mix of those ingredients is based on current US RDA standards. It’s still not wholly certain that simply hitting roughly 100 percent of the RDA standards is enough.

"Real" food—vegetable or meat or mineral—is a complex mixture of compounds and materials, with synergies forming between seemingly unrelated foods when eaten together. There is substantial evidence that eating two different types of foods yields more nutritionally than the sum of their parts would suggest; Soylent, with its componentized approach to nutrition, might be missing the nutritional forest in favor of the ingredient trees.

There’s no way to overcome that objection at this point. It may very well be correct, and Soylent may be missing something that a more holistic blend of ingredients would provide. Scientific studies on the effects of mid-to-long-term Soylent consumption on a person are nonexistent, and all we really have is anecdotal evidence that people have eaten it for many months without suffering any apparent problems. Rhinehart and several other early Soylent users are even tracking their blood chemistry (in fact, Rosa Labs purchased a Siemens Dimension XPand Plus Integrated Chemistry System to perform that analysis in-house), but there is so far no formalized research.

In other words, while it’s likely that Soylent probably isn’t doing anything bad—the ingredients, after all, are all well-known and well-studied—we just don’t know.

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Lee Hutchinson
Lee is the Senior Technology Editor at Ars and oversees gadget, automotive, IT, and gaming/culture content. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and human space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX. Emaillee.hutchinson@arstechnica.com